He apparently believes that the Gaza issue can be solved while ignoring the dominant fact on the ground.
E veryone should read Phil Klein’s excellent post on President Trump’s Gaza bombshell. I would call it Trump’s harebrained scheme except it should be obvious by now to everyone, including our enemies, that Trump has decided to govern as a flood-the-zone provocateur. The art of the deal, evidently, is to be the behemoth who takes outrageous positions that cause his weaker targets to shake in their boots; the master’s genius is soon demonstrated when the targets move away from what we’re meant to see as their previously intractable positions.
Trump, to the contrary, is a poor negotiator because he’s easily seen through: his counterparts know this is theatrics, not strategy. Take his threats of trade war against Mexico and Canada. Once our neighbors readied retaliation that would have caused real harm, once markets duly groaned, the president beat a swift retreat with, of course, a farcical declaration of victory. (As Dominic Pino ably demonstrates, Mexico and Canada made no actual concessions. The bottles, instead, were dusted off so the same old wine could be sold to the ingenuous as something new and magnificent.)
Moreover, the schtick of chest-beating, name-calling bravado — which is already tired after two weeks (plus four years) — is scant veil for Trump’s craving of plaudits and respect from the progressive foreign policy blob that he denigrates for public consumption. The president proposes an American occupation (or is it a buyout?) of Gaza, with the nearly 2 million resident Palestinians to be evacuated, arguably in violation of international law. (In fairness to Trump, there is force to his point that much of Gaza is not currently habitable, and population transfers for safety purposes may be justifiable — although the notion that the United States would want to take on that responsibility by occupying Gaza is lunacy.)
This is hard to see as anything other than Trumpian attention-grabbing. I don’t take the proposal seriously, but I do accept what it implies about Trump’s understanding of the Middle East and the conflict. That’s why the most hilariously clueless pronouncement made by the White House is that the president is pushing a novel proposal because he refuses to fall into the “insanity” trap — doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.
Alas, in this regard, Trump is just as insane as other presidents throughout the past half century. He believes the conflict can be solved while ignoring the dominant fact on the ground: sharia supremacist Islam.
I noted in the run-up to Trump’s first term, and then again after the ballyhooed trip to Saudi Arabia during which the president unfolded his deeply unrealistic “principled realism,” that Trump does not understand the threat. Oh, he knows there are “extremists” who carry out terrorist attacks, but he makes no effort to grasp why. Doing so would interfere with his stubborn conceit — the same conceit shared by his predecessors — that the Palestinians and their allies in Sunni-majority countries share our belief (which is actually the transnational progressive blob’s uncritical belief) in what the West calls “our common humanity.” They just want a better life for themselves and their children. They just want to live in peace and dignity. They just want to determine their own destiny.
From this flawed premise, Trump leaps to his flawed conclusion: Why wouldn’t Palestinians crave a Gaza Strip refurbished into “the Riviera of the Middle East”? Why wouldn’t they welcome American forces as liberators to bring this transformation about? And, in the interim, why wouldn’t their fellow Muslims in Egypt and Jordan — bankrolled by their fellow Muslims in Saudi Arabia and Qatar — accept Palestinians into their countries (you know, as “refugees”!) while construction is under way. Construction of what is unclear . . . except that there will be lots of hotels and lots of commerce. I’m constrained to ask whether anyone in the administration has wondered what the French Riviera would look like if it were run by fundamentalist Muslims (although the way things are going in Europe, we’re apt to find out).
Trump is ill-suited for the confrontation he is putting in motion precisely because of an attribute his admirers often tout: what they describe as his “strategic flexibility” and what he calls his “common sense.” Skeptics more snidely term it his “transactional nature,” while I can’t help but think he doesn’t believe in anything. A good negotiator has to be able to see things from the other guy’s point of view so he knows what’s not negotiable, and he must simultaneously maintain a frank assessment of his own case’s weaknesses. Trump comes up short on both scores: He can’t assimilate committed people who doggedly seek an outcome based on religious or ideological beliefs. Trump sees that as irrational and always figures they’ll come around if the price is right, because that’s what he’d do. And he has a distorted sense of his own persuasive powers and good fortune — as if, should things turn unexpectedly bleak, there will always be a Supreme Court immunity decision, a Fani Willis tryst, or a Jim Comey reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails to save the day.
But this is the Middle East, as it has been for 1,400 years. There is no Allah ex machina.
The Palestinians are ruled by Hamas because they chose to be. They don’t love Hamas, but Gaza is steeped in the region’s sharia supremacism, which Hamas is taken to represent. That includes, most of all, Hamas’s willingness to wage jihad, the purpose of which is always to maintain, attain, or reclaim the dominance of sharia, Allah’s law and societal framework. That is central to fundamentalist Islam. That is why Palestinians stand by Hamas, no matter how counterproductive to their well-being and prospects that seems to us.
Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the most successful Sunni sharia supremacist movement — not just in the Middle East but also in the West’s metastasizing Muslim enclaves. The Brothers have fallen out of favor with the Saudis, but they are strongly backed by Turkey and Qatar, and they continue to enjoy a strong following in their home base of Egypt — where, as the regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi looked the other way, they joined other Sunni supremacist groups in arming and otherwise supporting Hamas through the underground tunnel network. Palestinians in the West Bank are nearly as immiserated as those in Gaza: and yet, were they permitted to vote (the last and only election was 20 years ago), polls have long indicated that they would oust the Palestinian Authority and install Hamas. That’s what we’re dealing with here.
Hamas and its abettors are “transactional” only in the sense that, because they know they are fighting militarily stronger adversaries, they realize the need for occasional strategic pauses. They know delusional Western progressives are happy to facilitate such pauses as if there are hopeful signs that peace and the two-state solution are on the horizon. So, to get the surcease they occasionally need, Hamas will give Western chancelleries the illusion they want. But sharia supremacists never lose sight of the objective: They are committed, consistent with what they take to be their religious obligation, to destroy the Jewish state — both because it is the obstacle to the restoration of Islamic rule over the region and because Jew-hatred is unabashedly rooted in Islamic scripture. (I’ve explained these rationales before, most recently here.)
Sharia supremacists who dominate the Palestinian territories and the broader Middle East do not share the Western progressive conception of our common humanity. That conception is probably best exemplified by the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. Broadly speaking, Muslims do not accept this vision — and we’re not talking narrowly about jihadists; we’re talking about Muslim-majority countries and the regimes that rule them. This is why they collectively adopted the Declaration of Human Rights in Islam (also known as the 1990 Cairo Declaration). From their perspective, a separate assertion of Islamic principles was essential because Muslim beliefs about the human condition are not evolving toward some progressive resolution of the tension between liberty and equality. Rather, Muslims believe that Allah gifted sharia to humanity as the eternal, unalterable path to a life properly lived (sharia means “the path”). The highest exemplar of this life is Mohammed, Islam’s warrior prophet who forged the Muslim Middle East mainly through military conquest.
Sharia supremacists are not giving up Gaza. It is always possible that Hamas will be substantially destroyed as a fighting force (though that is unlikely in the short term given the Biden and Trump administrations’ cease-fire deal, which allows Hamas the usual strategic pause while it continues holding hostages). But were that to happen, Hamas would quickly be replaced by a jihadist group under a different name, spawned by the vigorous indoctrination of young Palestinians into the fundamentalist ideology — a project that is supported by Sunni regimes and benefactors throughout the region. Neither Gaza nor the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) will be abandoned because the goal is to extirpate Israel — i.e., to establish sharia rule from the river to the sea.
How do sharia supremacists define themselves? By opposition to the West, its institutions, and its principles. The mistake in Trump’s assumptions is the same one made by George W. Bush — the former president whom Trump castigates for having launched unnecessary “forever wars” in the Middle East, which seems ironic under the circumstances. And why were the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq “forever wars”? Because Bush convinced himself that the Muslims in the region were just like us, with the same hopes and dreams, and that once they saw what a flourishing future they could have thanks to Western pluralism, political diversity, and economic arrangements, they’d be hooked on progress.
Alas, what they’re hooked on is sharia. It’s not that they are ignorant or lack cognizance of Western ways. It’s that they reject those ways because they believe their own system, which they take to be divinely ordained, is superior. Americans and our allies could stay for 20 years in Muslim-majority countries, spend trillions of dollars, and suffer thousands of casualties, but once our government finally accepted the futility of the project and pulled out, Islamist regimes and their endemic Jew-hatred would be restored in short order — with nary a trace of the West’s well-intentioned effort to improve Muslim lives.
Muslim regimes themselves don’t care about improving Muslim lives. Only delusional Western progressives believe that the world is watching and will be judging us on this score.
The West Bank and Gaza were in Arab Muslim control for the 20 years between Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 and the Six Day War of 1967. To the limited extent that “Palestinians” were a cognizable group, Jordan did not take them in. It did annex the West Bank and grant the Palestinians there Jordanian citizenship, but, after Jordan and the other Arab countries lost the 1967 war, Amman in 1988 revoked the Jordanian citizenship that had been granted to Palestinians as well as its claims on the territory. Egypt was even less invested: content to leave the Palestinians stateless all along. Cairo never granted citizenship to Palestinians in Gaza, subjecting them to military rule instead.
Palestinians were only granted political rights and a path to national self-determination after Israel assumed control of their territories. For their troubles, the Israelis have been targets of what really is an endless war. The Muslim regimes have never cared about the Palestinians except as an instrument for pursuing the annihilationist jihad against the Jewish state that their sharia supremacist subjects support.
Muslims don’t want to live in the Mediterranean’s next Côte d’Azur; they want Israel gone. Even if President Trump realizes that no one is taking his Gaza gambit seriously, I don’t think he understands why.